October’s Best Reviewed Fiction

Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Gish Jen’s Bad Bad Girl, and Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field all feature among the best reviewed books of the month.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

*

1. Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon
(Penguin)

13 Rave • 6 Positive • 6 Mixed • 4 Pan

“It’s late Pynchon at his finest. Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, Shadow Ticket capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance—and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open … Pynchon may not have lost a step in Shadow Ticket, but sometimes he seems to be conserving his energy. His signature long, comma-rich sentences reach their periods a little sooner now … For most of the way, though, Shadow Ticket may remind you of an exceptionally tight tribute band, playing the oldies so lovingly that you might as well be listening to your old, long-since-unloaded vinyl.”

–David Kipen (The Los Angeles Times)

2. Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen
(Knopf)

11 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an essay by Gish Jen here

“Oscillates between plainspoken narrative and bold, italicized dialogues between Gish and her kvetching dead mother. The conceit is risky but pays off. The imagined colloquies punctuate the prose like counter melodies … The exchanges are edged with humor and skepticism: the mother scoffing at or replying brusquely to her daughter’s reminiscences, questions, speculations … What transforms it into a transcendent work of art is Jen’s empathy for all her characters.”

–Rhoda Feng (The Boston Globe)

3. Venetian Vespers by John Banville
(Knopf)

7 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Venetian Vespers here

“Maps out a territory halfway between Banville’s supreme fictions and his more forthright entertainments … An intricate thriller that is also a slyly fashioned work of art; a pastiche that is also indisputably the real thing. John Banville, up to his old tricks.”

–Kevin Power (The Irish Times)

4. Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett
(Riverhead)

6 Rave • 5 Positive • 3 Mixed

“Themes of relationships and communication might seem at odds with Bennett’s quest to shuck off the self and write from somewhere deeper, but therein lies the magic of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye … Fertile new ground for the author, and her prose is ideally suited to exploring them. Shape-shifting and splendid in its disregard for conventional wisdom and contemporary minimalist tastes, it weaves rococo abundance and brazen mundanity into something as porous and unknowable as the narrator’s inner world. Claire-Louise Bennett is a true original, working at the brink of what language can do.”

–Annie McDermott (Times Literary Supplement)

5. The Rose Field (Book of Dust, Volume 3) by Philip Pullman
(Knopf)

5 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Jam-packed with chases, daring escapes, splendidly operatic scene setting (including an evil sorcerer’s titanic mountain forge), strange and magnificent creatures, and charismatic supporting characters that readers will clutch to their hearts with undying love. It is tremendously entertaining … Questions may niggle at some readers, but they don’t interfere much with the pleasures dispensed by The Rose Field, from its thrilling action sequences to the return of such indelible creations as the witches with their harsh, ascetic wisdom and ragged elegance. The novel’s moments of keen emotion resonate especially well because Pullman never stoops to sentimentality or can’t.”

–Laura Miller (Slate)